The Perils of Open Science - The Big Idea Magazine - Spring 2021 | University of Houston

"The preprint archives are great for those who are in the field and want to build quickly on findings of others. They are not so great for those who want to write about findings to a lay audience but don’t have the technical knowledge to evaluate the findings for what they say and more importantly, what they don’t say. Until the pandemic, this wasn’t much of a problem. The public rarely took notice of findings in any of these preprints, and if a finding attracted attention, it was rarely time sensitive. This isn’t surprising: Most academic research falls under basic research, which adds to the body of fundamental knowledge of the discipline but rarely has immediate impact on daily lives.

The pandemic changed all this. Not only has the pandemic produced a torrent of publications that are made publicly available prior to peer review, the urgency to end the pandemic has shone a bright light on any findings that could impact the course of the pandemic, regardless of their robustness. Both the news and social media have been quick to grab anything newsworthy, and, because social media connects so many people now, unvetted findings can spread like wildfire before consensus is built within scientific circles about whether the findings hold up.

Moreover, disagreements along partisan lines about the severity of the pandemic and how to handle it has led politicians and regular people to cherry-picking findings that would lend support, however meager, to each of the camps’ positions, and turning findings with little or no support into “facts.” Hydroxychloroquine is just one example. Once these “facts” spread, it becomes very difficult to pull them back if they turn out not to have any scientific support. And we have seen worse. Much worse. In addition to unsupported findings from preprints, conspiracy theories have infiltrated our daily discourse, ranging from COVID-19 being a hoax to Bill Gates using the vaccine to implant microchips into everyone. Conspiracy theories have a life of their own and are even harder to pull back...."